Historical Fiction: “The Evening And The Morning” by Ken Follett

Hot on the heels of finishing Ken Follett’s World Without End, I devoured The Evening And The Morning, the gripping prequel to The Pillars of the Earth.

The Evening And The Morning tells the tale of how the fictional town of Kingsbridge came to be. Many of the novels’ elements are similar to those in The Pillars Of The Earth and World Without End, including several of the heroes and villains. But what makes each book in the series different is the period in which they are set. The Evening And The Morning takes place at the end of the tenth century, and it all begins with a Viking raid.

As fans of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Tales know well, the Vikings plagued England throughout the ninth and tenth centuries. The end of the latter century brought a new wave of attacks that eventually would lead to the Danish King, Swein Forkbeard, finally conquering England. While The Evening And The Morning ends well before Swein’s conquest, the Viking attack in the opening chapter is the inciting event that sets the story in motion.

The raid destroys the village of Combe, the home of Edgar, who is the son of a boatbuilder who dies in the attack. This forces Edgar and his mother and brothers to start a new life in a dreadful hamlet called Dreng’s Ferry. While trained as a boatbuilder, Edgar’s ingenuity eventually leads to bridge-building and even cathedral-building, which, throughout the novel, helps transform Dreng’s Ferry into Kingsbridge.

The Viking attack also causes Wilwulf, the ruler of Shiring and lord of Combe, to travel to France to negotiate with a Norman count who allows the Vikings to use his coastlands as a staging post. There, Wilwulf meets Ragna, the count’s beautiful daughter and the novel’s heroine. Their encounter leads to a brief love affair that results in Ragna’s marriage to Wilfulf. But let’s just say the honeymoon doesn’t last very long.

Wilfwulf is the eldest brother of Wynstan, the bishop of Shiring, and Wigelm, a thane (noblemen), and both are kin to Dreng, the horrible ruler of Dreng’s Ferry. As far as a collection of villains go, Follett outdid himself with this family. And unfortunately for Ragna, whom many in the family perceive as a threat, she soon discovers that a foreign noblewoman has very few rights in the kingdom of England—particularly one ruled by a weak king whom history has dubbed Etheldred “the Unready.”

Like Follett’s other books, a strong theme in this one is the cruelty and injustice of the Middle Ages. And in these very early Middle Ages, where local magnates ruled virtually autonomously from the king’s laws, it proves to be hell even for an intelligent and strong noblewoman like Ragna. But life back then was far worse for the peasants, as Edgar’s story reveals. Simply finding enough food to survive the winter was a mortal challenge, and a person’s entire life’s work could be wiped out by a nobleman’s cruelty or even the theft of one’s pig. Life was even worse, however, for the slaves.

English slaves don’t appear much in Cornwell’s novels, which are set several decades before the events in The Evening And The Morning, but they feature prominently in Follett’s novel (all of the slaves, as best I can tell, are Welsh captives). The treatment of many of the slaves in the novel is horrendous. Ragna abhors slavery (there was none in Normandy at the time), as does Edgar, and both undertake great risks to help the slaves. Suffice it to say, these two characters were easy to root for, much like Merthin and Caris in World Without End.

As I noted in my last review, few authors are better at plunging their characters into increasingly terrible disasters than Ken Follett, and this book is no exception. This constant conflict, however, is what makes the tale so gripping, and this one became a page-turner to the very end. If you enjoyed Follett’s other Kingsbridge novels, I suspect you will love The Evening And The Morning.

A Note On The Late Tenth Century

This novel is one of the few I’ve read that takes place during the same years as my novel, Enoch’s Device, and its sequel, The Key To The Abyss. At times, I even found myself imagining what Brother Ciarán and Alais were doing at the same moment events were unfolding in this novel.

I can attest that The Evening And The Morning stayed true to much of my historical research. The book references the Viking settlements on the Isle of Wight, which feature prominently in The Key To The Abyss. Likewise, there are scenes set in Glastonbury Abbey, which also figures into my second book. Swein Forkbeard appears in The Key To The Abyss, though he is only mentioned in The Morning And The Evening. But the weak King Ethelred has plenty of scenes in Follett’s book.

Follett does overlook a few things in the novel. For one, he makes little or no mention of the massive Viking raids on Dorsetshire in 998, which are referenced in the historical Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and portrayed in The Key To The Abyss.

Another missing element was the belief by many in the late tenth century that the biblical end times would occur at the end of the Millennium, a thousand years after the birth of Christ. These apocalyptic fears are an essential part of my novels’ setting, but Follet gives them nary a mention. Perhaps fears over the End Times would have distracted from a story that already has its characters facing plenty of fearful situations while trying to survive in the cruel and unjust Middle Ages.